Mature Technology 2

Say a mature technology would be a class of products that has passed the ‘gadget’ period and become a widespread convenience. It has to have many features done right, and not only the engineering part, but the designs, it has to solve some common problems and so on.

If we look at a tech in its infancy right now, the smartwatch, we can see some ‘unresolved’ issues. The capabilities are well developed, thanks to the smartphone internals most smartwatches use: you can already do far more stuff than you’d want to. The smartwatch doesn’t know what it is, yet. It’s that time in the lifecycle of a product when the designs are wildly different: there is no ‘standard’ yet. It seems unlikely that we’ll settle into one soon. Of course, as it has been written, there are other issues, like personal style dependance, that may impede a one-fit-all solution.

Wearable tech is public.

Having people use tablets in parks, bus stations, cafes or all action scenes, as tablet makers tend to advertise, may be a similar problem with the one the smartwatches face right now.

Tablets are already good enough at what they do, but what the commercials do not show is the fact that one still needs to plan ahead how to carry the thing to the action scene! For a tech to be mature, most of these indirect aspects have to have some practical resolve.

Innovation can be characterized as bringing rules/solutions from one domain to another. In the pool of all creative solutions, generally, very few are radically new; they need only be ingenious in the context of the domain. After all this is what thinking out of the box is all about.